OpenCoSF Conference

I attended the OpenCoSF inaugural event, Friday Oct. 12, where 2000 attendees attended sessions at the worksites of more than 50 tech companies located in San Francisco. It was produced by John Battelle of Battellemedia. I used to like to visit my friends at their offices to see what their work environment was like. This has become harder to do, as security concerns have grown as fast as openness.

I went to Federated Media Publishing for my first OpenCo stop. They had about 30 people in a half full audience. They connect branded goods with content produced by bloggers. They keep track of preferences of tens of millions of people. They work with a couple of hundred thousand bloggers who produce content for the millions of readers. Levis pays them to arrange for product to appear in a favorable light in content. Federated Media  is not an ad agency. If the viewer can recognze it as an advertisement, which might be something to avoid clicking on, they have screwed up. Some agencies are beginning to see them, not as competition, but as a resource. Each worker in the office had a lot of workspace, two large monitors on the workstation.

Next I went to Wired Magazine. They had about 25 guests in a room with 15 chairs. Editor in Chief Chris Anderson led a team describing the vision for the company. Wired began in warehouse space South of Market. This kind of warehouse flavored office space has become a cliche. Editorial staff is here. Business Offices is with CondeNast in New York. Originally, about half the staff was engineers. Now that is all outsourced. This publisher tries to be fair but not even handed. They preach that technology and innovation will change the world for good.

In the afternoon I went to see the offices of Bloomberg West. The original business is still the core business. Stock traders can subscribe to a rented workstation starting at $1900 a month. Some of the workstations used by the 70 reporters in the office had four monitors. Before the internet this replaced private phone calls among brokers and investors as the way to get business news first. The publishing empire still gives the workstation subscribers at least 15 minutes headstart before the news hits the airwaves. We saw Cory Johnson performing on television the show Bloomberg West. The closing story of the day was that Apple had agreed to pay the Swiss Railway a license fee for copying the clock face too closely.